Fish Wrap: Anglers get quite a workout hauling in albacore

Small SKIFFS and party boats around the Bay Area are returning to the dock splattered with beef-red blood and filled with torpedo-shaped fish. In other words, the late-summer albacore bite is on — and the schools are close enough that Marin anglers have had a chance to taste the action.

The sun was just rising two Thursdays ago as four North Bay fishermen cruised at 20 knots under the Golden Gate Bridge on a 26-foot Farallon, with Tak Kuwatani, of Tiburon, at the wheel. Behind Mount Diablo and the East Bay Hills, the sky turned golden as the quartet motored southwest toward a seamount known to local mariners as the Gum Drop. The group spent two hours in transit, and finally slowed to trolling speed when they found themselves surrounded by diving birds, whales and porpoises — all the signs that clouds of anchovies are swarming below, with tuna in pursuit.

But 15 minutes produced not a strike, and when a "radio fish" near the Pioneer Seamount was detected amidst the voices crackling through the airwaves on the boat's handheld communication system, the boys decided to follow the rumor southward. And here, 50 miles from home, the action broke wide open. Their lines were still descending when three rods were hit at once. Kuwatani handled the wheel as Richard Birnbaum of Larkspur, Robert Tankersley of Cloverdale and Jim Fletcher of Mill Valley began the clumsy dance of luck-struck fishermen: One rod went under another and over the next while the men stepped on each other's toes and stumbled around the rail, trying to avoid tangles and fight each fish toward the boat.

Albacore, which can easily swim 40 miles per hour in explosive spurts of strength, don't always come in easily. They tend to make several long runs just under the surface before making their death dive. Then, spent with exhaustion, they often conk out 200 feet below the boat, mandating a 10-minute bicep workout to bring them to the surface.

Kawutani gaffed each tuna and hauled it aboard, and with the triple hookup, dinner was in the sack — but the angling went on. The group burned some more gas trolling, but the day was too warm and the sea too flat not to enjoy the unusually serene weather, so they killed the engine and fished in the simplest way a rod-and-reel angler can: Each man snipped off his dangling, jangling barrage of flashing metal blades and trolling gear and retied with nothing but an unweighted hook.

The tuna were still chasing bait balls in every direction, and occasionally dashing beneath the boat and the baited anchovies never lasted long in the water; within minutes, a muscle-bound tuna would gulp the little fish, fight like a freight train and eventually come to the gaff. Several landed albacore even spat up freshly eaten squid onto the deck of the boat and the anglers found these recycled baits work perfectly well. By 1:30 p.m., 14 fish to almost 40 pounds were in the boat and the call was made to return home.

The daily bag limit for albacore for licensed sport fishermen north of Point Conception is 25 — if you can believe such a gluttonous allowance of state law.

"But what are you going to do with so many fish?" Birnbaum said recently. "We had all we wanted."

Some fishermen who have taken too many tuna may occasionally throw those fish that they're too exhausted to fillet into dumpsters, the spoils of an angler thinking with his belly, or with his freezer. Birnbaum says he has seen garbage cans near boat launch ramps full of such wasted fish.

So if you go, take just what you know you can handle. A game fish is a terrible — and illegal — thing to waste.

And if you don't go, consider salmon, which are streaming through the Golden Gate now and creating a stir in the waters between Tiburon and Angel Island. Further within the bay, striped bass have been appearing after a long summer of absence — little 20-inchers though they are. We all wish we could say the same of the halibut, but they've never shown in numbers, and summer officially ends Saturday.